Tag: npm

The Basic Steps to using node on an Azure VM:
1. Open the Port
2. Install Git and Install Updates
3. Install Node and NVM
4. Code and Install Express
5. Run it and check it out!
6. Use forever to keep it alive

1. Open the Port
We’re not talking battleships or submarines we’re talking Infrastructure as a Service.
Visit the landing page for your Ubuntu Virtual Machine:

And select the resource group in the top left corner:

Resource groups are the way we break down how our VM interacts with the internet, other vms, storage, and public/private networks.

To open the port we need to change our network security group which is represented by the shield. (Underlined in the above screenshot)
Then we’ll select settings -> Inbound security rules

This will allow us to open up our VM to the Public Internet so we can visit it like any other website.

Under ‘Inbound security rules’ SSH is already included:

We’re going to add a new Inbound security rule named ExpressServerPort where we’ll set the Destination port range to 3000 which we’ll see later when starting our server. Here’s the configuration pane for our ExpressServerPort:

2. Install Git and Check Updates
Git is fun!

SSH into our Virtual Machine like we did in the VM intro then enter:$ sudo apt-get install git

After entering npm init we’ll be walked through a configuration step for our app. The only one that matters for now is (index.js) which will be the entry point for our app everything else can be the default for now.

If you were actually going to submit/share this code you’d want to accurately fill out this info.

After the initialization step we’ll add express and list it as a dependency:$ npm install express --save

Here’s what those steps look like:

Weeee now have express and an app ready for your code!

Lets open nano and put the helloworld sample into index.js

$ sudo nano index.js

Now lets run our app!$ node index.js

Now that its running lets visit it by entering the IP address and port number into our browser.
In my case the URL is: http://13.88.180.170:3000/